Ona Teresa, Ona Teresa, I’m here. Speak to me.
Truth, she had learned at the side of Margret of the Arkosa Voyani, need not be bitter.
But it was, this truth.
She could have left the child with Ona Teresa; she could have attempted to fight the demon. And why had she not? Because Ona Teresa had commanded her?
No. No. She turned a moment to look at Ariel, and she saw the whole of the girl’s pale, peaceful face. She had stayed in the circle because—for just a moment—she wanted to protect that child. Those wives. Because it was an answer to the past that had defined her, had destroyed her, had birthed her. She wanted to hold that girl.
Because she could now do little else for the Serra Teresa di’Marano, she mourned.
You never had wives.
I did. If even only for a brief time, I did.
You gave me what your gift denied you. You protected me from the weight of its curse, as you could. You lived by, and with your curse, and in the end, it was your only power; your only company. What have you done? What have you done to yourself?
Her eyes were wide; she dared not blink. Blinking would cause the tears to fall, and Ona Teresa would not appreciate them.
Her hands unstoppered the waterskin; she struggled a moment with her aunt’s shoulders; tried to turn her over, to unfold her. The tremble had grown, and grown quickly. She felt the Serra Teresa’s resistance, although another might not have been able to discern what was will and what, reflex.
These were the fevers the talent-born faced. Kallandras of Senniel College had told her that once. He had told her more, but the rest eluded her now.
Kallandras!
Nothing answered; even the wind was silent.
In the Dominion, no Serra feared silence. Silence was a retreat; silence was a platform; silence was a gilded cage. All waiting was done in silence, and only with permission or invitation did the confines of that waiting allow for the things that she had loved best: song, the sound of samisen strings; the fuller, wilder notes of Northern lute.
The talent that had been curse had informed the whole of her life.
Ona Teresa, you must drink. You must take the waters of the Tor. Ona Teresa, please.
She had learned to hide the gift. It had come easily, with time; hiding was something that any Serra of the Courts must learn, and the secret itself was secondary to the need to keep it from the eyes or ears of the powerful. What man would accept you, if he knew that he might, by a single spoken word, be unmanned? What man would allow you to live?
The woman who shivered, head now bumping against the fold of her lap, had been the one who had made clear what the cost of discovery might be. As a girl, the cost seemed transparent; as a woman, for the single year she had had a harem of her own, a harem’s heart, it had been a tragedy beyond compare.
Ona Teresa, drink. Command, in the single word. She hated to use it.
Hated to see it fail. The Serra Teresa, so graceful in life, now gasped at air and liquid like a dying fish.
Angry, suddenly angry, Diora looked up. “Serra,” she said coldly. “Matriarch. Leave us. Now.”
But they couldn’t; she realized it after the words had left her. The circle had not been breached; the battle—if there was one—might still require a wall behind which to stand.
And the Serra Teresa’s grace, her elegance, her absolute control, was a simple casualty of war. Not even death would have taken that from her.
But that casualty was not the worst.
Diora had learned to hide gift; had learned to hide heart. As she trickled water into the mouth of her aunt, as she struggled to hold snapping neck up, so that water might travel to throat, she realized that these two—gift and heart—were not separate.
Had she been forced to hide her particular song from her wives, she would never have loved them; they would never have loved her. They would never have known what she was, and the unknown could—at best—be worshiped, at worst, feared.
They—Serra Teresa di’Marano and Serra Diora di’Marano—had called the voice a curse. For all of their lives together, the one exposed and the other hidden, they had commiserated in a fashion acceptable to the Courts; they had enfolded their words in silence.
Had spoken, she realized, not to ear, but to heart.
She would lose that.
Had lost it.
Realized it now, for truth. Ona Teresa had gathered all of the power she possessed and thrown it into the single word; had gathered more, and used that as well.
For a moment, the Serra Diora’s perfect hands shook; the liquid failed in its slow trickle.
She would be able to speak to the heart of a woman who had been almost a mother to her, but that woman, this woman, would never tender reply.
A thousand men did not come to the bridge. Hundreds did; but Jewel ATerafin knew, by the frown across Avandar’s still, observant features, that the Marente forces had, as Ser Alessandro feared, been split.
“How long,” she said softly, “will it take the rest to ford the Adane?”
He frowned. She saw the lecture come to his lips and leave; he offered her position—tenuous and strange as it was—no insult in front of the Clemente forces. Whether that was for her sake or theirs, she couldn’t say. Didn’t much care, as long as he answered the question.
“Hours,” he said, “if they are horsed; the bridges are meant for wagon traffic, but they are not meant for the hooves of warhorses moving at speed. They travel at night,” he added, “and they will use some caution; if a horse slips on the bridges, it will be costly.”
But she shook her head. “The Widan,” she said quietly. “And the kin.”
Quietly, though. The words didn’t carry.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
MARAKAS par el’Sol made his way to the courtyard. The battle was over, and as he took each step, as he walked away from the physical location of the creature’s ambush, he felt that he was walking out of the heart of legend; his memory could not contain more than the shards of what had occurred, and how.
It was not a land he desired to leave, and yet, once he had gone beyond it, not one he desired any return to. Such paradox would haunt him, time and again, in the course of the war. He was uncertain of the fate that had befallen the Radann he had led here. But he could count the bodies—or the remains—that he could see, and he knew that not all of his companions had fallen. Sometimes retreat was wise. Sometimes it served some other purpose.
The halls were silent, but as he traveled them, the evidence of fire vanished; the flowers rested in their containers within the long dishes, the tall vases, that punctuated evenly spaced trestles.
Verragar had fallen silent; he held her with care. The skin that fire had blistered had fallen away; blood adorned her hilt, seeping its way into the winding bands that composed it. His body would soon halt the flow of that liquid; it had already dimmed the pain to a bearable level.
And the battle was not yet done.
Although Verragar was simple sword now, dim and unstained by anything but the black of soot, he held her knowing the sheath was not yet her home.
Life seeped into the halls as he ventured farther and farther from the radius of the fire’s destruction; he saw dim lights beyond the opacity of screens; heard the huddled hush of muted seraf voices; heard the cries of their children, gathered in arm and lap, and muffled, but not extinguished, by the guardians who had swept them into their refuge.
Beyond these rooms, he heard the voices of Clemente cerdan. They did not seek the safety of silence; their voices punctuated and destroyed stillness, giving command and order to chaos.
It was these voices he sought; these and the men who used them.
They were not few in number, but they were not more than twenty; he met them just within the doors of the great hall. They paused when he emerged, and stared, and he realized that he no longer bore the insignia of the Radann par el’Sol; the sun emblazoned in gold upon dark fabric had been burned clean by fire, a
nd little of it remained.
What did, rags and strips of fire-edged cloth, told a different story.
He held his sword up as they approached, and they halted some five yards away.
The foremost of their number executed a perfect, military bow. “We were sent to your aid by the Radann,” the man said, his helm gleaming in the torchlight.
“Your aid is required upon the walls,” he replied, his voice parched and dried by fire and smoke. He forced clarity into it with will. “The domis has been damaged, but only the Lady’s face now disturbs its halls.”
A few men spoke in the last rank; the men closest him, those who could see what fire had wrought, offered him the silence of awe.
“We were well served by the Lady,” their leader said, rising, “when she sent you to us from the lee of her forest.”
“Let me join you,” he replied, “upon the walls. It is there that the battle—if battle comes—will be decided.”
“You killed the creature.”
“There were two,” he said quietly, for he was a modest man. “And Verragar does not sense another presence; if the second is gone, it is likely that you now owe a debt to the Havalla Voyani.”
The circumstances were dire enough that these words evoked no unease.
The cerdan bowed again. “We would be honored by your presence, par el’Sol.”
“And I,” he said, courteous, although the words still troubled his throat, “honored by yours. Come.”
The torches were not so bright as the moon.
The Radann par el’Sol bowed his head a moment at the Lady’s bounty; even the wind’s voice was still. As he left the domis, he found the Radann who had retreated into the halls not yet destroyed by demon fire, and he lifted a hand in subtle command, forestalling their bows. It was not what etiquette demanded, and even upon the battlefield, perhaps especially upon that field, etiquette was a thing of import.
Yet he had no desire for it; it separated him from those who offered obeisance, creating a distance that seemed unearned in the lull.
Storm’s eye, he thought.
Voices replied, carrying with it the end of peace: the men upon the walls raised horn. He was not familiar with all of the Clemente calls—indeed, each Tor, and each Tyr, used the horn’s voice as if it were a private language.
But this once he had no need; what he did not know by rote, he understood by instinct.
The Clemente cerdan tensed. Upon the walls, the archers lowered bows, pulled strings, bent straight shafts of tapered wood until they resembled a single-stringed harp; war’s instrument.
They drew fletched arrows, the weapons—the cursed and hated weapons—of the North. But they did not send shaft into darkness; they waited.
He mounted the slender stairs that led to the curtain wall; they were narrow but solid, and they did not creak or protest his weight. As he drew even with the archers; the bowmen glanced at him—at the naked chain shirt, the fire-shaved face, at Verragar—and made room among their ranks.
From the highest point in Sarel, Marakas par el’Sol looked into darkness, and the darkness answered him in a fashion, birthing orange glow: lamps and torches, flickering as they moved. He could not count them all, but he could see, by their spacing, that they went on into a distance that his eyes could not yet penetrate.
But he frowned as he watched, and after a moment, he said, “Damar is to the South?”
One of the bowmen nodded grimly.
The frown grew.
“But these men—”
“Yes. From the North.”
“And in number,” he said softly.
“If they mean to take Sarel,” the bowman replied, “we will make it costly.”
Marakas nodded. “The kai Clemente?”
“Across the gate,” the man replied. He did not speak again; the moving army—and it was an army—absorbed the whole of his attention. Well before they reached the gate, they would be in range of the arrows that had been drawn in Northern fashion, against such an attack.
In the dark of a night such as this, mistakes could be made. But the men of Clemente showed no outward signs of the nervousness that could lead to disaster; they waited, bows not yet drawn, watching for some sign of banner, some hint of the identity of the foe they would face.
The army approached, and it gathered speed—or so it seemed to Marakas, suspended between battles, between the imperative of two different types of survival.
But although the men drew close, they unfurled no banner, made of themselves no certain target. Marakas looked across the gap the gate occupied; he could see that the kai Clemente stood, hands upon the crenelated stone, back bent, head forward, as if those extra inches could bridge the gap between anonymity and identity.
Now, the bowmen drew arrows, lifted bows, pulled strings; they prepared, aiming as they could between the bowers of the trees that lined the road. But they did not fire.
Nor did the kai Clemente give the order that might have released arrows’ flight; he bent farther forward, craning neck. Not, Marakas thought, a risk that the Tor’agar would have taken had he been present.
The army did not halt, and every foot covered diminished the usefulness of the archers present. If they were a weapon, they were sheathed. Although the kai Clemente lifted hand, and with it silver horn, he did not play it, did not bring it to his lips.
A breeze blew, strong enough to slant the torch flames.
The kai Clemente shouted for light, and more torches were lit across the length of the wall upon which he stood. The archers themselves brought no lamps and no lights that would obscure their vision.
But the fire exposed their presence to those who now approached.
The unidentified army spoke with the voice of horns.
Marakas watched as the flames that moved above the helms of armed and mounted men now shuddered to a stop; like a wave, he thought them, against rock.
Some three of these lights gathered; men detached themselves from the body of the army and began to move—slowly—toward a gate locked and barred against their passage.
As they approached, Marakas felt an odd twinge; his fingers spasmed awkwardly around the hilt of a blade that—at this height—would be useless for some time.
He gazed at the flat of Verragar, the blade was nascent now; simple steel, with a glimmering of light that spoke of edge. The light was odd. Not blue, but gold, and at that, faint, as if it were a thing at once liquid and fire.
He frowned.
The kai Clemente brought horn to lip, and in that moment, the Radann par el’Sol understood what the blade knew, and he lifted his voice instead.
“Kai Clemente!” he cried, all formality forgotten.
The younger man turned at the sound of his name, at the use of a familiar title carried by a stranger’s voice. But the horn did not follow.
Marakas made his way to the stairs and almost flew down them, his left hand anchoring itself to the rough surface of wall, his right hefting blade.
A moment, no more, and then the kai Clemente made his way from the heights as well, surrendering view to the urgency of the Radann’s unspoken request.
They met upon the stones carved in the colorless crest of Clemente, boots skirting the edge of the rising sun and the grooved representations of its six rays.
“My pardon,” Marakas said, bowing as formally as a man thus accoutred could bow. “Ser Janos kai di’Clemente.”
But it was not for nicety of perfect title that the young man had descended; Ser Janos waited until Marakas rose, his lips pressed into a thin line within the folds of his slight beard.
“The gate,” Marakas said. “The gates must be opened.”
The boy was not son to Ser Alessandro; he had none of the older man’s fire, and none of his history. He hesitated only a moment, and then he bowed. “As you request, par el’Sol; the clan Clemente is in your debt this eve, and our trust has not yet been misplaced.” He turned to the men who manned the gate, and he barked a sharp ord
er. They were better trained than he; they obeyed without hesitation.
“Who are they?” Ser Janos said, offering the bare hint of doubt as the grind and creak of the great gates muted the words.
“I do not know,” the Radann par el’Sol replied. “But one among them carries Balagar.”
“The kai el’Sol is there?”
Marakas shook his head softly. “No. And if he were, I would not now counsel you to take this action.”
“But Balagar is—”
“Yes.”
“I don’t understand.”
“No more do I. But there is a reason, Ser Janos, that the Hand of God now numbers four; Balagar has not been wielded since the death of Fredero kai el’Sol.”
He waited, blade drawn; the kai Clemente dropped hand to sword hilt, but did not likewise arm himself. He drew breath, straightened the line of shoulders that had rested too long in an awkward position, and drew himself to full height.
He was not a short man, although he was not a large one; his face was pale in moonlight, as if he had spent too much time in the Lady’s Dominion, and not the Lord’s.
But for all that, when the great gates were at last silent, he retreated into silence as well, taking the mantle of the Tor’agar upon slender shoulders.
Wondering—and Marakas could read this clearly as he reached out to touch the kai Clemente’s weaponless hand—if that mantle were now his in fact, and not in waiting. The grief and fear in that fleeting glimpse surprised Marakas, altering his opinion not of heir, but of the man who ruled Clemente.
The old ways, Marakas thought: Ser Alessandro had accepted the family his brother had left behind with grace and the strength of a man’s affection, and Ser Janos feared to be diminished by his loss.
The Toran who had not been ordered to the side of their Tor—and they numbered a scant four—now hastened down the steps; they formed a small square, two men deep and two wide, on either side of the kai Clemente.
In the moonlight, the riders approached the gates, and as the gates opened, as the archers failed in their fire, one man at last lifted pole and wound banner, and the banner fell like judgment in the blaze of torchlight.
The Riven Shield: The Sun Sword #5 Page 72
